Grayshift, the firm behind the GrayKey iPhone hacking tool, has been, well, hacked. According to Motherboard, leaked portions of GrayKey code online and demanded over $15,000 from the company to stop publishing the material. The code itself doesn’t appear to be particularly sensitive, but Grayshift confirmed to Motherboard the brief data leak that led to the extortion attempt.
Law enforcement agencies across the country have purchased GrayKey, a relatively cheap tool for bypassing the encryption on iPhones. Grayshift is an American start-up that appears to be run by long-time U.S. intelligence agency contractors and an ex-Apple security engineer named Braden Thomas.
It offers a $15,000 iPhone unlock tool named GrayKey, which permits 300 uses. That’s for the online mode that requires constant connectivity at the customer end; an offline version costs $30,000 and comes with unlimited uses. GrayKey can purportedly unlock iPhones running iOS 10 and 11, with iOS 9 support in the works.
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